What did people think witches looked like?

Answer 1

If you're talking about the past, then people used to hate them. They accused everyone of being a witch. There were terrible trials to see if one was a witch. The accused were tied up, and dumped off a cliff into the sea or a river. If the person sunk and drowned, they were innocent. If they floated and/or drowned, they were guilty. So everyone died, regardless. They were objected to barbaric practices, even though said witch never intended harm to anyone or anything. (Part of the Pagan religion says that nature should be respected, and the well known 'the good that you do returns three times, but the bad that you do returns also three times'. The large majority of witches stay true to this but some hurt others because they think they are superior.) So, people used to loath witches and think they were unclean, sacrificed humans, worshipped the devil and unbelievably, commit incest. The public view has changed greatly and now they are largely accepted as part of equal society.

Hope this helped you :)

Answer 2

We can see in the legal codes of the Middle Ages that some people believed in, and feared, witches. Such belief is not easily derived from Christianity, which has only rather ambiguous scripture about witchcraft, and the issue was not pressed by leaders of the Church during the Early Middle Ages, so the assumption seems to be that the idea had pagan roots.

There were laws against witchcraft in Anglo saxon kingdoms and elsewhere, but some important countries took official positions that believing in witchcraft was itself a superstition, and derived from this statements that killing a person for witchcraft was murder and a capital offense; such was the case in the Kingdom of the Franks, the Kingdom of Lombardy, and the Carolingian Empire. The fact that these laws exist shows that the belief that witchcraft existed was around, but did not dominate the people.

During the course of the 13th century, just about the time the Renaissance was about to begin, peasants of Switzerland and Croatia petitioned the pope to conduct inquisitions into the practice of witchcraft in those areas. This was probably based on superstition and fear, but the resulting inquiry did result in people confessing to witchcraft, seemingly without much pressure to do so. In one case, two women who confessed to witchcraft with an intent to improve people's lives or heal people were told to stop practicing witchcraft and released, because there was no clearly defined prescribed action.

The inquisitions did, however, yield other results, and so trials took place and people were executed. During the remainder of the Middle Ages, witch trial seem only to have taken place where specific individuals were accused of specific practices. There were no witch hunts, in which people of a large population were examined to find out who were witches and who were not.

Nevertheless, the times being what they were, by the end of the Middle Ages, concern was developing among religious people, who were fed rumors of Satan worship that included orgies, cannibalism, infanticide, and so on, by story tellers who remain anonymous to us and whose motives cannot be known (my guess is that they mostly knew they could attract an audience with such tales, possibly with a view to being paid). In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII commissioned two men, Kramer and Sprenger, to produce a system for discovery and prosecution. The result was a book called Malleus Maleficarum, which was produced on the new printing presses in 1487 and distributed widely.

About eighty years after the production of Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunts began in earnest. People had begun to believe the threat was real, and there were professional promoters in the new business of identifying witches and bringing them to trial. This situation was exacerbated by King James VI of Scotland (James I of England), and King Christian IV of Denmark, both of whom seem to have been obsessed by the subject to some degree.

There is a link below to an article on witch hunts.

Answer 3

Witches were and still are ordinary people. The word witch is non-gender specific, so witches were and still are, both male and female. They were and still are followers of a nature-based, non-Abrahamic spiritual path.

There is no mark, dress code, secret hand-shake or any other way to recognise a witch other than to ask.

Answer 4

people thought witches were terrible deadly people who wore a black dress, a hat, and always use to be carrying a brom stick!!

Answer 5

Probably because things happened to them (animals or people getting sick, weather phenomena, etc) that they feared and that they could not explain by natural forces.

Answer 6

withced in medievel times looked like us not like the witch in wizard of oz